SIL Peru

Mashco Piro is an Arawakan language of Peru whose speakers have lived in voluntary isolation from the rest of the world until recently. To my knowledge no linguistic data from this language had been published until the recent list of Parker (2015). That brief corpus of 24 words gives us a preliminary glimpse of how Mashco Piro phonology compares and contrasts with that of Yine, a closely related language. In this paper I posit an initial linguistic analysis of the wordlist and discuss the difficulties inherent in working with such a small set of data. Despite these limitations, the picture which emerges is that Mashco Piro’s segmental inventory and syllable structure may be essentially identical to the phonemic system posited for Yine by Matteson (1965), Lin (1997), Urquía Sebastián and Marlett (2008), and Zimmermann (2013). At this point the main difference between the two languages appears to lie in their prosodic (metrical) parameters for assigning stress. This study thus highlights how far we can delve into the phonology of an undocumented language with a very small sample of its vocabulary, given appropriate caveats.